[UPDATE] Literature and Rights in the Age of Enlightenment (3/8/2010; MLA 1/6-1/9/2011)

This panel seeks to investigate the intertwined histories of literature and rights in the long eighteenth century. How does imaginative writing in this period contribute to the development of the humanitarian sensibility and the emergence of human rights? Conversely, how do changing conceptions of rights shape novels, poems, plays, and essays? Papers on literary, philosophical, and legal formulations of natural and positive rights, and on questions concerning freedom, equality, justice, toleration, torture, cruelty, and pain are all welcome.